This report takes stock of discussions between academics and country practitioners on opportunities to improve the design and delivery of regional development policies in a series of seminars organised during 2017 by the OECD and the European Commission. What can governments do to enhance ...

The Rethinking Regional Attractiveness in the New Global Environment report highlights lessons learned from multiple regional case studies from five EU countries (Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden), additional work with Latin American and Caribbean regions, and a series of webinars and one-on-one dialogues on rethinking regional attractiveness. The OECD’s innovative multidimensional approach to assessing regional attractiveness considers global engagement beyond international connections and economic factors alone.

This book contributes to a “rethinking” Canadian aid at four different levels. First, it undertakes a collective rethinking of the foundations of Canadian aid, including both its normative underpinnings – an altruistic desire to reduce poverty and inequality and achieve greater social justice, a means to achieve commercial or strategic self-interest, or a projection of Canadian values and prestige onto the world stage – and aid’s past record. Second, it analyzes how the Canadian government government is itself rethinking Canadian aid, including greater focus on the Americas and specific themes (such as mothers, children and youth, and fragile states) and countries, increased involvement of the private sector (particularly Canadian mining companies), and greater emphasis on self-interest. Third, it rethinks where Canadian aid is or should be heading, including recommendations for improved development assistance. Fourth, it highlights how serious rethinking is required on aid itself: the concept, its relation to non-aid policies that affect development in the Global South, and the rise of new providers of development assistance, especially “emerging economies”. Each of these novel challenges holds important implications for Canada, for its development policies and for its declining influence in the morphing global aid regime.

Canadian regional development today involves multiple actors operating within nested scales from local to national and even international levels. Recent approaches to making sense of this complexity have drawn on concepts such as multi-level governance, relational assets, integration, innovation, and learning regions. These new regionalist concepts have become increasingly global in their formation and application, yet there has been little critical analysis of Canadian regional development policies and programs or the theories and concepts upon which many contemporary regional development strategies are implicitly based. This volume offers the results of five years of cutting-edge empirical and theoretical analysis of changes in Canadian regional development and the potential of new approaches for improving the well-being of Canadian communities and regions, with an emphasis on rural regions. It situates the Canadian approach within comparative experiences and debates, offering the opportunity for broader lessons to be learnt. This book will be of interest to policy-makers and practitioners across Canada, and in other jurisdictions where lessons from the Canadian experience may be applicable. At the same time, the volume contributes to and updates regional development theories and concepts that are taught in our universities and colleges, and upon which future research and analysis will build.

The purpose of this work is to develop a better understanding and thinking about the cumulative impacts of multiple natural resource development projects. Cumulative impacts are now one of the most pressing, but complex challenges facing governments, industry, communities, and conservation and natural resource professionals. There has been technical and policy research exploring how cumulative environmental impacts can be assessed and managed. These studies, however, have failed to consider the necessary integration of community, environment and health. Informed by knowledge and experience in northern British Columbia, this book seeks to expand our understanding of the cumulative impacts of natural resource development through an integrated lens. The book offers a timely response to a growing imperative – proposing integrative response to multiple natural resource developments in a way that addresses converging environment, community and health issues. Informed by the editors’ experiences across several complementary areas of expertise, we envision this book as appealing to a wide range of researchers, educators and practitioners, with relevance to a growing audience with appetite for and interest in integrative approaches.

The past two decades have witnessed dramatic shifts in public policy, with increasing complexity not only in the relationships between the state, society, and the private sector, but also in the interactions among various orders of government in places such as Canada, the United States, and the European Union. In Policy Governance in Multi-level Systems, Charles Conteh examines how these seismic structural changes have impacted the work of public organizations and how these organizations are responding to modifications in their operating environments. With an emphasis on Canada's controversial but resilient regional economic policy, Conteh focuses his study on four agencies - the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Western Economic Diversification Canada, FedNor, and FedDev - and their evolving policy portfolios and modes of operation in New Brunswick, Manitoba, northern Ontario, and southern Ontario. Drawing upon literature in public administration, urban and regional governance, as well as multi-level governance, Conteh offers a cutting-edge analysis of contemporary and emerging understandings of multi-level governance and regional development while acknowledging the historical context of policy and intellectual traditions. Combining a solid theoretical background with empirical depth and practical lessons from the field, Policy Governance in Multi-level Systems is an invaluable resource for policy analysts, policy makers, and practitioners in many tiers of government, business, and community leadership.

This book discusses the role of digital technologies in the growth and development of cultural organizations and the creative sector. It includes contributions by authoritative scholars who address this topic through different perspectives, methodologies and approaches. The first part of the volume focusses on theoretical contributions that identify the main transformations caused by the digital revolution, the use of data, outlining new possible analytic frameworks and future lines of research. The second part of the volume presents empirical contributions applied to different fields in the study of the cultural and creative sectors. These range from analyses of traditional cultural organizations such as museums, the evolution of trajectories in the fashion industry, techno-creative communities, digital services for tourism, to cultural and creative industries and wealth and creative work. This edited volume will be of great value to scholars in the fields of Economics and Management including Economic Geography and Economic Development. Students and researchers interested in learning more about new technologies and their impact on cultural and creative sectors will also benefit from this book. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Planning Studies.

The future of northern British Columbia, a vast, resource-rich region of vibrant cultures and diverse communities, could be either driven by a narrow economic agenda or guided by innovative, place-based solutions that seek to build viable communities and resilient local and regional economies. Investing in Place is about creating the foundations for renewing northern British Columbia’s rural and small-town economies. Markey, Halseth, and Manson argue that renewal is not about nostalgic reliance on the policies and economic strategies of the past – rather, it is about building a pragmatic and innovative vision for development, one that acknowledges both the opportunities and the challenges posed by resource development and global and technological change. For policy-makers and residents alike the path to renewal lies in place-based development, which consists of people working together at all levels of the community and region to take advantage of local opportunities in a sustainable, responsible way.

This document contains papers on the following topics: situating the debate on government reform; coping with change: how public and private organizations read and respond to turbulent external environments; reshaping the management of government: the next steps initiative in the United Kingdom; priorities and potential in reinventing government; experiencing a sea of change in the democratic potential of regulation; and the promise and the problems of reinventing local government.